Facebook crawler not able to read my metatags on
http://nitansh.fwd.wf/article/travel/best-all-inclusive-resorts-for-romance/3189783/
but it successfully read the tags for the
http://nitansh.fwd.wf/nurture/
Both are on made using extending same template base.html and by injecting metatags.html into them. you can refer the HTML code by inspecting element.
While http://nitansh.fwd.wf/nurture/ shows the metadata even without having JavaScript enabled, http://nitansh.fwd.wf/article/travel/best-all-inclusive-resorts-for-romance/3189783/ shows only the following head when JavaScript is disabled:
<head>
<script src="//cdn.optimizely.com/js/687271175.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js"></script>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
When you make the metadata available without requiring JavaScript, Facebook’s service will probably be able to parse it.
I have tried everything I could before posting this question here on stack overflow.
I am unable to understand why Facebook doesn't pick up any related information to posts on hellyalol for example title, thumbnails or description.
This is an example http://hellyalol.com/181/my-date/
All the open graph tags are in place as shown by source code but facebook debugger doesn't pickup any open graph tag.
<meta property='og:title' content='Will you be my date?'/>
<meta property='og:url' content='http://hellyalol.com/181/my-date/'/>
<meta property='og:site_name' content='Hell Ya LOL'/>
<meta property='og:type' content='article'/>
<meta property='og:image' content='http://hellyalol.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fart-exhibit-150x150.jpg'/>
Another big confusion is When I change permalinks in WordPress for example my-date to your-date it surprisingly works.
e.g http://hellyalol.com/195/years-ago/ this one is working just fine while you share it on facebook but still debugger doesn't pick any open graph tags :S but still I changed the permalink twice for this post before it could work with WordPress
Can any one help? Thanks a lot :(
Server Details: I am using Lightspeed and using w3 total cache with memcache enabled.
Make sure to not miss this in your opening html tag:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:fb="https://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
This is your current html tag - as you see, some parts are missing (or wrong) there:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
dir="ltr"
lang="en-US"
xml:lang="en-US"
xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/">
Just found the answer. For facebook to work with your blog, you should must have www in front of domain. I changed the domain url from http://hellyalol.com to http://www.hellyalol.com and its working
When I link to my website on Facebook a thumbnail comes up but it is not the thumbnail I want to come up. How do I change the thumbnail. It shows the image on the object debugger
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=totelfootball.com
How do I change the image?
I have seen similar posts but want to no a simple solution for the issue? Can it be done on Facebook no coding involved?
you can add into <head></head>
this tag <link rel="image_src" href="http://URL-TO-YOUR-IMAGE" / >
OR change <html> tag to
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
and add into tag <head></head>
this tag
<meta property="og:image" content="http://URL-TO-YOUR-IMAGE" />
Don`t forget to test your link using facebook debug tool
Go to http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
Enter the URL following by fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
Examples:
http://www.example.com?fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
http://www.example.com?postid=1234&fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
OR visit:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http://www.example.com/?p=3568&fbrefresh=89127348912
I was having the same issue last night, and I got this solution from some website.
Facebook saves your cache thumbnail. The thumbnail will not change even if you delete the image from your server. But Facebook allows you to refresh by using fbrefresh
I hope this helps.
You can choose what thumbnail is displayed by adding an og:image meta tag to the HTML of totelfootball.com:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
Facebook uses meta tags on the page you're sharing to determine which image, title, and description to show when posting a link. The meta tag syntax follows Facebook's OpenGraph specification.
The most important meta tags you need to define are:
<meta property="og:title" content="The title of the sharing preview" />
<meta property="og:description" content="The first few lines of content below the title" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/your-image-1200x630px.jpg" />
This of course only works if you have complete control over the site you’re sharing. If you’re sharing an external link (like a news article), you don’t have access to their site and therefore can’t change the meta tags. I'm using ShareKit.io, which allows you to change the title, description, and image of any link you’re sharing without having to fiddle with meta tags.
Easier than this.
Go to the link you shared. Open it in a new tab.
Right upper corner --> Refresh Share Attachment
New thumbnail image gets fetched and you get an option to choose another.
Hope this helps :)
Is there any way to get facebook's crappy Open Graph meta tags to validate if my doctype is <!DOCTYPE html> (HTML5)?
Other than facebook's Open Graph meta tags, my document validates perfectly.
I really don't want to use <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"> as that creates a whole new set of problems.
Here is an example of one of the validation errors in question...
Error Line 11, Column 47: Attribute property not allowed on element meta at this point.
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
Any help would be appreciated... I have been searching off and on for days to no avail.
For HTML5, add this to your html element like described on ogp.me and keep your og: prefixed properties:
<!doctype html>
<html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
...
For XHTML (like OP's question), use the name attribute instead of property attribute. Facebook lint will throw a warning, but the meta value will still be recognized and parsed.
<meta name="og:title" content="Hello Facebook" />
Yes. To validate as HTML5, add the prefix attribute from the Open Graph docs:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<title>Valid HTML5!</title>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="">
</head>
<body></body>
</html>
Copy and paste the above to the w3 validator to check.
It is production ready – Apple uses this method on apple.com.
The short answer is no, not at this time. All other answers are workarounds, hacks, or just plain crazy. The only long-term solution is that Facebook needs to create an alternate syntax that is valid HTML5.
To those recommending targeting Facebook by the "facebookexternalhit" User Agent, you have to remember that other companies are following Facebook's lead with these tags. For example, Google+ will fall back to the OpenGraph tags if their preferred Schema.org markup isn't present. Since most sites aren’t using Schema.org attributes (especially if they’re spending the time to use OpenGraph correctly), you can easily miss out on enhancing your snippets on sites like Google+ by following this advice.
With the ubiquity of Facebook, it really isn't a good solution to target them directly--even if their choice of implementation is problematic for developers. When looking for solutions on a site like Stack Overflow, you always have to remember that there can be unforeseen consequences to these methods.
For our main sites, we've stuck with XHTML+RDFa for validation sake, and it's worked well enough. I'm hoping that as HTML5's usage grows, the Facebook team will start accepting a valid format for this metadata.
As for why we care about validation:
We've found that validation, when possible, helps to alert us to errors in our pages by not teaching us to ignore them. Since we all use validation extensions in our browsers, we know instantly if there's a validation error (or warning) on a page, and can investigate whether it's possible to eliminate it (which 99+% of the time it is). This saves us time dealing with restrictive implementations of the specs, especially on fringe and mobile platforms nowadays. We've seen a huge reduction in odd bugs because we're aware of our pages being valid and know that what's going on in the browser doesn’t have to do with invalid markup that a particular UA might not interpret as expected.
These meta tags are only required when facebook scans the page for these tags.
<?
if(eregi("facebookexternalhit", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])){
echo '<meta property="og:type" content=xxxxxxxxxxxxx';
// continue with the other open graph tags
}
?>
The said tags will only be present when facebook needs them - this method with PHP removes them completely for all other instances including W3C validation.
Many of the answers here have become outdated. Please don't snoop for headers or write via JavaScript (since the processors might not evaluate the JS).
The W3C Recommendations (Extensions to HTML5) called RDFa 1.1 and RDFa Lite 1.1 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer/ ) have made the "property" attribute valid and conforming. In the mean time (since the older answers here) the validator http://validator.w3.org/check recognizes the attribute as valid. In addition, the Open Graph Protocol documentation, http://ogp.me/ , has been updated to reflect RDFa 1.1 (it uses the "prefix" attribute).
The W3C work has been done with input from OpenGraph and schema.org among others to resolve the kind of issue raise by this question.
In short, make sure your OG tags conform to RDFa and you are golden.
More than a Year has passed and the best solution we've got is to wrap the meta tags in some sort of server-side verification.
In PHP I did:
<?php if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"],'facebook') !== false) { ?>
<meta property="og:title" content="Title of the page" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="123456789" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.example.com/images/thumb.jpg" />
<?php } ?>
It really works for Facebook. But I really don't like this idea!
One recent solution is to register a prefix in the html or head tag:
<html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns# fb: http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
or
<head prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns# fb: http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
taken from here - sorry, page is in german...
Bad solution for the meta tags. If you wrap those in Javascript then the Facebook Linter won't find them. That's the same as not putting them in at all.
Wrapping like buttons and such in script works to help validate against XHTML 1.0 but not HTML5.
In JSP:
<%
String ua=request.getHeader("user-agent").toLowerCase();
if(ua.matches(".*facebookexternalhit.*")){
}
%>
<meta property="og:image" content="images/facebook.jpg" />
...
<%
}
%>
Or:
<c:set var="ua" value="${header['User-Agent']}" scope="page"/>
<c:if test="${ua.matches('.*facebookexternalhit.*')}">
<meta property="og:image" content="images/facebook.jpg" />
...
</c:if>
Well, Visual Studio 2011 tells me that the "property" attribute is invalid. However, the W3C seems to be a little more lenient:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpacificfoods.com%2F
You'll notice that that I added Open Graph tags per Facebook's recommendation to that site, and it does not break the W3C validator, which I consider to be authoritative.
Consulting the official W3C HTML5 specification for the meta tag, it is clear that the use of the "property" attribute (in lieu of the "name", "http-equiv", "charset", or "itemprop" attributes) is not valid. However, their validator validates it (???). I have no explanation for this discrepancy.
I would be inclined to say don't worry about validation, I don't believe having invalid mark up will hurt your search engine ranking. e.g. googles technical recommendations do not mention standards. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#2 . Html5 allows you provide more information to search engines which they can then use, but I can't see them down ranking based on not validating.
However if you feel it helps you to validate you can use
<script>document.write('<meta property="og:type" content="website" />')</script>
to have these tags present and have a html file that will pass validators.
Although it will cut off non-Javascript users, I've used this
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
document.write('<fb:like href="" send="false" layout="button_count" width="100" show_faces="true" font=""></fb:like>')
//]]>
</script>
and it validated perfectly. It shows and works fine with Firefox, Opera, IE, Chrome, Safari on Windows, and with Firefox, Opera, Safari on Mac.
I have the following HTML in my HTML head:
<meta content="***" property="fb:admins">
<meta content="***" property="fb:app_id">
<meta content="Site.com" property="og:site_name">
<meta content="http://site.com/thumbnail.png" property="og:image">
<meta content="activity" property="og:type">
<meta content="Test Title" property="og:title">
<meta content="http://site.com/page/?Id=56&Source=" property="og:url">
<meta content="Test Activity Description" property="og:description">
But rather than the details I have specified showing up in my facebook feed, instead I get a link to site.com/page (without the URL variables after it), the title seems to be coming from the <title> rather than the <meta content="Test Title" property="og:title"> and the description is coming from the first <p> on site.com/page (which isn't there when you include the URL variables)
any idea what I am doing wrong?
EDIT
Running the page through linter has thrown up some interesting issues.
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwaggleb.com%2F12454874521145474-2%2F
The problem seems to stem from the fact that the image, the URL, the title and description are generated using javascript. When facebook calls back does it not allow the JS to run before fetching the results?
I need to change the data with javascript unless there is a way to pass the whole page through PHP, pick out the data I need and then place the correct URL, title, description and image into the meta tags. I do not have direct access to the database, so I must retrieve this data from the DOM
Maybe it was cached by facebook before you put in these tags.
Try to clean them in Linter: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/